


Doom am I become:

by TheLightdancer



Series: The New Age of Marvels [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU version of Phase IV, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:20:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29657454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Betty Ross, Death (Marvel)/Thanos, Irene Adler (X-Men)/Raven | Mystique, Reed Richards/Susan Storm (Fantastic Four)
Series: The New Age of Marvels [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2179368
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2





	1. Challengers of the Unknown:

_The Realm of Death:_

To a mortal eye it would have been a vast pavilion of ivory, shining white in the infinite blackness of abyssal space. Four skulls crowned its dome, only one of which was humanoid and that vaguely. It was a realm that seemed deceptively small until something stepped into it in which point it was not as vast as the Crossroads of Infinity (for nothing ever was, in truth, save that itself) but it was near-infinite all the same. Its Mistress smiled at that conceit, the skeletal element of her face grinning in a way that bone could not or should not. She was Death, and she was Oblivion. One of the four entities who had made the Infinity Stones together with her brother Infinity, and their rivals Eternity and Entropy. 

They had made the stones and they were each mightier than all of them together. Before them nothing else could stand.

Death had come to awareness, however, of one who had been a faithful worshiper of hers for a long time, and at last, belatedly, to one who had given her fervent prayers in her realm of Hel that she had not heard for the mightiest of the Aesir of Asgard were beneath her as a bacterium is beneath a mortal man. She had been amazed, intrigued, delighted. Two champions, no less.

She went to a region near her pool and raised her right hand and it became as flesh. To a mortal's eye she would have seemed a woman of olive complexion, with full lips and eyes that shone with an eldritch light that was only by analogy light at all. She spoke Un-Words that were ancient before the most ancient of things were born, and then dust arose and from the dust formed bones. The being that was formed before her to a mortal's eyes would have been vast, enfleshed at nine feet tall and hulking with the strength to face the mightiest of beings in face to face combat and to triumph easily. From bones the organs and viscera and other elements of life came into being slowly and she made sure, as a small demonstration of her power to her worshiper and adorer that the restoration of the nerves _hurt._ He pleased her that he did not scream even when she tried to make him.

Flesh rose around his body, purple and darker than it had been in his first life. He remained kneeling in front of her, awed and horrified to have been restored, uncertain as to where he was and when he was. She placed a hand on his forehead and spoke another Unword and then his eyes lit with a terrible light and his throat glowed with it, as it threaded through his veins and then, with a wave of her hand, clad him anew in a variant of his older armor.

"W-Where am I?" He rasped, in a voice rusty from disuse.

_**You are in my realm, Thanos, son of A'Lars. Long have you worshiped me, once you sought to court me. Before you decided it was best to transform your goals from the halving of life by the slower path of war and conquest to the faster one of the stones.** _

Thanos froze then. He saw something, something that seemed to be human and yet his height and yet he knew instinctively that she was not. Her touch was cold and for a moment her flesh changed and it was pale as night, her hair dark and her eyes shining with an eldritch light.

"You're Death," he rasped, a note of genuine fear in his mouth.

_**Why fear me, my wondrous worshiper? I have restored you, and I have made you stronger. Your eyes shall shine with fire and your hands burn with it. Energy can be transformed by you into an endless power source that shall never drain itself nor go dry, for energy can never be created nor destroyed. Distance is no challenge to you, you can cross a galaxy as easy as the mindless animals fly from continent to continent on any given world. Your strength, your endurance, your agility, I have enhanced them all.** _

"Why am I worthy of this gift?"

_**You have worshiped me for a long time, Thanos, Son of A'Lars. I have chosen to return that worship, and to restore you to life. You are stronger than you have ever been, and it is a fortunate thing, too. Old games are beginning to stir again and I would have my champions be strong, and worthy of me.** _

"Champions?"

_**Yes, my love. I shall show you the other.** _

He heard Un-Words spoken and even he, one of the mightiest entities in Existence shuddered to hear what was sound loosely and by analogy, and the way energy formed and reshaped and rewove itself into a form smaller than his, clad in dark green and black, her hair as dark as Mistress Death's and her gaze having a tinge of feral madness. 

Hela, daughter of Odin, knelt before Mistress Death and became prostrate.

"You have heard me at last, my Goddess!"

Mistress Death smiled and her smile had too many teeth in it.

**_I have. Rise, Hela. There are things that begin to unfold. There is a harvest to come and its workers are few. Hela, my herald, go forth and announce your resurrection. Sow fear. The Guardians of the Galaxy, so-called, did so much to harm my beloved Thanos. Let them know fear._ **

Then she turned to Thanos. 

_**First I would....know you, my beloved, who spent your life and your armies in pursuit of that worship. And when I have drunk that well of pleasure dry, there is a task that I shall send you on. You shall have your vengeance upon the Earth if that which Hela, in her avarice for her own glory, shall awaken fails where its first crisis does not. Two things come forth to it.** _

_**He hungers, Thanos of Titan, and where he hungers, the World-Eater shall not be denied.** _

\--------

_Experimental Spaceship Launchpad:_

Four people were quietly infiltrating a place that SHIELD and SWORD had believed secure against any but the most dangerous threats. Against Reed Richards, Susan Storm, her brother Johnny, and Ben Grimm they hadn't had a prayer. They were all unconscious in the sound dream that they were on guard and nothing had actually slipped in. 

"Egghead, this is nuts. I've seen that data yer showin' us. That anomaly is.....I don't know what it is, but why now? Why here?" 

"I know what I'm seeing, Ben. If I've seen it, others have too. With Wakanda and Victor revealing themselves the world's a more dangerous place than it was and the last thing anyone needs is Victor von Doom gaining access to that kind of power."

Ben grumbled. "Dammit Egghead, that's not what it is and you know it!"

Sue glared at them, as Johnny snickered. "Can you two wait until we're at least on the ship to bicker?"

Ben glared back. "Suzie, let's face it, we're going up here in the middle of an unidentified kind of energy in this whole Challengers of the Unknown business. Egghead does that for a livin' sure, but why's he doing it with a starship he didn't build?"

Reed turned to him and the look of determination on his face made the rest of the team abashed.

"I know what those sensors recorded. Events, or entities, more powerful than the Infinity Gauntlet. More powerful than the blip. I lost you, Ben, and we all lost Johnny, for five years from something lesser. I failed to bring you back. I won't fail you, or anyone else. Again."

"Entities?" It was Johnny, no longer joking who asked with a note of fear.

"Yes, It would be bad enough if I had detected one and that would be reason enough. But I didn't find one, I found two."

On that less than encouraging note the group of four interdimensional explorers from the Baxter Building, who had dubbed them after Reed Richards' favorite comic book series from his childhood in their first name, snuck onto the SHIELD starship _Starjammer_ and then with careful use of Reed's technology had bypassed all security precautions and were clearing for launch.

"Well, here goes nothin'" grumbled Ben and with that, he began to steer the ship from the launch pad into space.

Even with all his grumbling, there was no thrill to Ben like flight. Nor was there anything greater than probing into the frontiers of the hidden things and the mysteries of the world.

As they broke out of Earth orbit and snuck past Earth sensors and the unexpected sight of an alien starship that uncloaked itself and moved with what sounded like angry surprised squawking sounds in an inhuman tongue, they saw the anomaly.

"Motherfuc-" was all Ben Grimm had time to say before the anomaly slammed into them with a brilliant light and a searing pain that unmade them and reforged every element of their being. None of them even had time to scream.


	2. Metamorphoses:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The four who took the Starjammer find themselves transformed upon their return to Earth. 
> 
> A team of hidden superhumans prepares to make the revelation of the existence of a new superhuman community to the world.

_The_ Starjammer, _after the event:_

Ben Grimm groaned when the energy had passed through them. His body was on _fire_ at every possible level, and he looked out with weary eyes at his teammmates. He felt like he was on fire but for a moment Johnny seemed to _literally_ be on fire. Sue seemed to flicker in and out of visibility, and Reed was......no-one could _stretch_ like that. He felt heavy, as if stone were smothering him in an embrace he would never leave, and then his vision solidified.

"Motherfucker," he groaned. "Brace yourselves," he rasped. "We're going to have a bumpy ride."

Like a stone the _Starjammer_ fell.

They had taken off from Cape Canaveral and transcended above Earth's orbit before the anomaly hit. Then he had flown an experimental starship that seemed to hit at alien technology and he had made himself proud and pleased at the ease with which he'd adjusted to controls he'd never seen before. Now he was flying a very expensive brick shaped like an arrowhead.

As the _Starjammer_ fell the fires that seemed to consume his body burned more brilliantly and his lips parted in a low and agonized scream, and then he slumped forward and a body increasingly heavy increased the fall of the ship.

\------

_Wakanda, Shuri's laboratories:_

"You are certain of this?" Shuri asked in Wakandan, their language an Nguni language that was, in their admittedly biased view, purer than most for it had none of the clicks picked up from exposure to the Khoisan peoples. 

"Yes. The anomaly we were charting, it struck that starship. An American faster-than-light craft, meant to be what they think is humanity's first experiments with this." Okoye's words were quiet, laden with no small

Shuri rolled her eyes. "Wakanda has had that technology for the last six hundred years."

"Yes, Princess, but the world would not know of that, would it?"

Shuri nodded. "You have a point. Should we seek to help it?"

Okoye shook her head. "No. Even if your brother were to say yes, I would still say no. You and I are not old enough to remember but in 1960 the United States, accustomed to flying planes over the Soviet Union had one shot down. The Soviet Union used that to embarrass the United States and almost touched off a world war. If the United States knew how much Wakanda knows and what we know of things that they do not want revealed...."

Shuri nodded.

"Not to mention Canada."

"Yes," Okoye sighed. "A pity that Weapon X steered clear of Africa for recruits, minus that one hunt for a meteorite in the Congo. It would have given us the excuse."

Shuri's nose twitched. "Colonizers are such savage people."

Okoye nodded. "Before Killmonger we would have had more right to boast given how we changed after the Unification Wars. Not so much now."

Shuri sighed again, and they watched the fall of the _Starjammer._

_A field in Kansas:  
_

The small town in Kansas heard the sirens screaming for a shelter in place as a burning object fell, and most of the sensible people in the town ran immediately into their homes and into their cellars. Two of the stupider ones stood and watched in mute shock as an experimental spaceship, its outer edges charred and damaged by some incomprehensibly powerful force, slammed into the ground with a tremendous boom and an explosion of fire and clouds of dust. 

For a moment reality seemed to stand still and then there was a vicious hammering from the starship's interior. A hammering like a great fist slamming into it from within.

The cockpit erupted open as it seemed to have been hit with a blow more powerful than any merely human force could explain and they gasped in awe and in shock. A figure rose, once human but now human no more. He had grown in size and height and bulk, and he carried in his arms three people. One seemed to stretch impossibly long without breaking. One had a heat-haze around him and it seemed like parts of his body were burning. The other flickered in and out of visibility.The hulking mountain of orange rock slid down the ship with an eerie grinding sound and a shower of sparks as the stretching man eventually fell down with him and his body seemed to loop around the rest. 

Ben Grimm took a deep breath, as his vision wavered. He heard one of the Kansas rednecks saying "Holy shit, what is that thing?" and just closed his eyes as exhaustion rose to swallow him.

\--------

_SHIELD Headquarters:_

"Director Coulson, the _Starjammer_ made planetfall." 

"Yes, near Minisberg."

"Right...."

Awkward silences followed and everyone in the room looked around at each other.

"Wait, you mean to tell me that these people hijacked a ship and fell out of the sky near a place named Smallville? For real? That's just bullshit."

Coulson snorted.

"None of them are from Krypton." 

"Was it wise to allow Doctor Richards to steal that ship?"

"Wise or not, it's what we wanted to happen. He's been trying to warn governments worldwide of some kind of anomaly. After the Blip nobody can take that lightly, and he's the only one able to track it outside Wakanda. And regrettably, the Wakandans are not the best at sharing information with us any more than we are with them." 

More silence.

Then the drone hovered in closer to the charred ruin of the _Starjammer._

"Fuck me," one of the agents said in what was more nearly prayer than obscenity.

"Director, you might want to take a look at this. What _happened_ to them?"

Coulson looked at the transformed four from the _Starjammer_ and his eyes went very wide indeed.

\---------

_North Carolina coast:_

Seven figures stood by the coastline, as one of them, tall and clad in a crimson outfit with a helm that seemed strange but served a very important purpose indeed, looked. He could sense it. Well within international waters, not at all choosing to provoke the United States, but it was less than nothing to the Master of Magnetism. His eyes roved out. Two of his agents were with a third, their daughter, in pursuit of a missing son. Seven were here with him. His eyes flickered to the one with green hair in a subtly green outfit, and his lips formed a tight but approving smile. 

Beyond her there was a hulking man in a form that seemed fat on the surface but could do a great deal more. There was Fabian Cortez, whose abilities were clever enough that he welcomed him even as he knew this one was one to keep watch on. There was Sabertooth, squatting in his animalistic snarl (and he gave a slight snort of contempt at the sight of Sabertooth and visibly turned away in disgust as his eyes flickered onward). There was Avalanche stretching and preparing for the prospect of who or what might come to face them, if this went the way it so easily could. Thankfully Tony Stark had died, so that would be one less complication. Only a complication, for the Master of Magnetism feared no mere Homo sapiens. Then there was Toad, a relic of an earlier time that he kept around out of amusement more than anything else, who squatted and watched like the filthy animals he named himself after.

And last on that list was Pyro, who flicked a lighter with a casual nonchalance that defied everything else.

Such arrogant fools were flatscans, the obsolete prior form of humanity.

He had learned that SHIELD and the experts in so-called Enhanced and Mutate humans did not believe that psychic powers existed. His friend and rival Charles and the thing they'd encountered in Egypt could have told them that. Charles had enjoyed that he and another of his students who hid enormous power behind lack of confidence, hid their evolving species behind that veil.

Then the Blip had swept through them all and the time of secrecy had ground to a halt when even Homo superior had shown itself no more able to stop things than any other lifeform. His daughter who had made the dreadful mistake of siding with Nazis, of all people, had vanished. So had half the Brotherhood. So had _Charles._ Magnetic energy crackled around his fist.

Half of humanity, obsolete and the new and improved, had vanished. Then they had returned and the demonic monster Thanos that had done this to all of them was said to have died by the snapped fingers of Tony Stark.

Well, after all this time, and the exposure of the creatures of Attilan by virtue of SHIELD meddling where it should have left things alone, it was time for mutants to reveal themselves. Today, as that power that built at his fingers surged out through the ocean and the Russian sub _Petersburg_ suddenly ground to a halt in the depths of the sea, there would be no going back.

His power surged out and he began to _pull._

He smiled. After decades of quiet and deadly adventures, of vengeance against most creatures (Arnim Zola had died at his hands in person, but the monster had transferred himself to machines and somehow managed to survive, he'd learned, though Captain America had finally slain his last traces. Another good service that Steve Rogers had done him) that had sought to hurt him and Magda.....no more secrets.

The submarine began to rise and he could sense a helicarrier that was moving over the skies starting to freeze as it detected his powers. His forever-young face froze in a vicious smile.


	3. The Dawn of Homo Superior:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Brotherhood of Mutants makes its inaugural strike on the world. 
> 
> Anna Marie Darkholme runs from a fearsome enemy.

_Prague:_

Anna Marie Darkholme ran. Somehow, in some way, her mothers and she had triggered the most unexpected and unfortunate possible tripwire.

She had no idea how or why this force was chasing her, even as she saw the derelict set of Communist-era buildings by the impact of a superhuman form and blazes of light.

None of them had any means to know that Carol Danvers had _met_ and fought Raven Darkholme in the past, when she had been a US military officer on a tour in Germany, as none of them would have predicted the red and blue blur gleaming with eldritch power was the same woman in the military outfit with the crew cut from back in the day. She ran harder, as a building erupted and a shower of glass and dust followed, yelping in pain when the glass cut her thigh.

 _That_ was not good.

_North Carolina Coast:_

Magneto's power expanded outward and the _Petersburg_ breached the waves like a vast mechanical whale. His might gleamed around it with an electromagnetic crackle, as he hissed in Yiddish into the radios of the ship, overpowering it with a small display of his broader scale of might. Further the submarine rose, a vast hulking thing that was equipped with the most deadly weapons of human make outside the fabled arsenal of once-secretive Wakanda. Magneto's eyes flashed with power and the SHIELD Helicarrier floating over the battlefield soon had its systems scrambled and began to dip from the clouds, breaching the waters above as the submarine breached the others. 

He distantly heard the Toad sneering "Show off."

A killing impulse surged within him but he resisted it.

With another simple display of his powers he cast the same effect that hijacked the radios of the _Petersburg_ to apply across much of the east coast of North America and even into Iceland.

"Humanity," he boomed, in an English accented by his Yiddish past and his experiences with the Soviet Union when it had been a going concern.

"Your age of supremacy has ended."

The helicarrier breached the skies, dipping lower, and the planes upon it were held in place as he smiled with a grimace that reflected the humility, forced upon the arrogance of the Flatscans. He'd been tempted, very strongly, to do this when HYDRA sought to make its plans unveiled at last, but the one flatscan he truly respected, Steve Rogers, had beaten him to the punch. In any other case he would have resented that and gone out of his way to make that resentment shown. Here?

"The age of Homo superior has dawned. Homo superior, defined by the unknown gene, the X-gene. We are born with power beyond your ken. We are to you what you were to the Neanderthals in the old days, and as the fate of the Neanderthals, so shall the fate of Homo sapiens be." 

The submarine then disgorged nuclear missiles, all of them with inactive warheads (not that Magneto especially cared). 

"Behold the most powerful weapons of your making. Weapons capable of defeating the Chitauri assault on New York City a few years ago, beyond the efforts even of the Avengers."

He _squeezed_ with a casual assertion of his magnetic fields and then the missiles crumpled and their inactive warheads crumbled likewise, incapable of ever being wielded again. Magneto's eyes were glowing now and sparks of electromagnetic force rippled outward, slicing into the ground with a casual destructive force.

"Your weapons are useless, for your kind is obsolete. They are irrelevant, as you no longer matter. Kneel before your extinction or defy it, the outcome shall be the same. Humanity has a new face now. We are the future, you no longer matter."

With that he began to squeeze the submarine.

\-------

In the Quinjet, the Avengers had multiple reasons to thank the foresight of the late Tony Stark.

It was Steve who voiced what others were thinking.

"You know, it would really be an awkward start to all this to have to swim our way through,"

The rest nodded.

Only Wanda Maximoff was quiet, her hand tapping her chin.

"Wanda?"

She heard Steve.

"Yes?" Her Sokovian accent was thicker (though a trained ear would have detected hints of earlier accents, as if the voice that had spoken across the radio of the Quinjet had sparked improbable memories).

"You with us?"

She nodded. "My apologies. I was....distracted."

She heard the Green Goliath give a chuckle, still finding it awkward to hear the reedy thin voice of Bruce Banner from the Hulk's....hulking green shape. His arm was healed, by now, of the ravages of the Infinity Gauntlet and the Hulk's laughter shifted to a grunting sound more like his primordial self as anticipation of the combat to come sent him into a fever pitch. 

"Easy there big guy," they heard the voice of Rocket say as he patted the Hulk on the shoulder, a retrofitted and modified Stark Jetpack reliant on repulsor energies giving him new mobility. "We don't need to take a swim as Cap said. Youse can swim easy. Me? I look like a drowned pussycat."

Thor snorted then. "Rabbits shouldn't look like cats, that's for sure." Thor still had no small amount of portliness, the five years of drowning his sorrows in booze and fast food of godly proportions not readily thrown off. For all that he resembled his late friend Volstagg more than himself, Thor was still the deadliest fighter besides Wanda, and his grip on Stormbreaker showed that to be true. His own eyes began to flash with lightning, though not enough to further afflict the electronics.

Clint wasn't with them on this mission, he'd gone with Carol Danvers to chase someone Carol defined as an "old foe" without saying much. Facing someone powerful enough to lift a submarine out of the water, destroying its nuclear weapons, and to simultaneously hold a Helicarrier while hijacking their radios was......Thor and the Hulk looked forward to it with due eagerness. Even Steve felt uneasy.

Instead they had War Machine, who flipped down his helmet and cycled up all his weaponry, knowing that it would not be an easy fight. He'd overcome paralysis with Tony's help. Next to that this so called 'Homo superior' would be easy.

Last of the team was a Wakandan. Nakia, of Wakanda's Merchant tribe. She was clad in a bright red vibranium-lined outfit, ring blades at the ready. She was quietest. T'Challa had returned to Wakanda, mentioning a word that had popped up more and more in the wake of the death of Tony Stark. Latveria. A minor nation and former Soviet Socialist Republic, just north of Moldova and east of Transia, near Sokovia and Symkaria, all part of the breakup of the Latverian Soviet Socialist Republic, Latveria had found its own superhuman ruler in Victor von Doom. 

Doom's open declaration of his status and his desires to expand to reclaim the boundaries of Greater Latveria had Europe nervous. Nervous enough that the United States and Russia had made cautious overtures, and nervous enough that Wakanda, the world's most advanced nation, took Latveria seriously. None of this mattered right at this moment. A heavily armored Darth Vader wannabe in green robes was immaterial when the Helicarrier that was in the skies began to careen downward with a deliberate speed.

Captain America looked at his team.

"Right, that's our cue." As he nodded, the Hulk and War Machine and Thor moved out, Thor's eyes lightning up and the Hulk managing to land in just the right place to catch the Helicarrier and suspend it on his back.

Magneto's lip curled in an aristocratic sneer as the rest of the Avengers descended from the plane, Thor in particular drawing his eyes.

He'd seen the sheer raw power of Xavier's newest students, including the youthful Ororo Munroe. Part of him wondered if the lady of thunder and the Asgardian faced off, if the mutant goddess or the alien would prevail.

"OK," he heard the voice of Steve Rogers.

"I don't know what your grievances are with the world, Mr. ah..."

"Magneto. Master of Magnetism, Lord of the Electromagnetic Fire."

With a cold smile Magneto then _pulled_ and the submarine began to hurl toward them only for Wanda to turn around and catch it in a blast of her own power, and to his genuine surprise, they were stalemated.

Polaris then lifted herself in the air with a cold smile as the Wakandan springboarded in the air, propelled by the finest technology of her people.

Captain America found himself facing a creature with a bestial snarl and wickedly sharp claws, claws that drew blood where they scratched him and necessitating his reliance on his shield.

Toad was taken out by the flying rodent who shouted "Oi, ugly, catch!" He hurled two spheres and the spheres erupted into a kind of stasis field. Magneto shook his head. He expected little from the Toad and still he was disappointed.

As the ground began to tremble, he could feel Avalanche asserting his own powers, seeking to disrupt the Hulk's footing, the submarine coming to drop into the ocean again, where it would subsist in a kind of limbo, the aftershocks of chaos magick and the power of the Master of Magnetism giving it a kind of buoyancy that would last just enough for the crew to be able to restart its systems before that ran out and they sank like a stone. He growled then, and as Thor hurled Stormbreaker, he saw Fabian Cortez augmenting his daughter's powers, enabling her to bring the Wakandan to her knees.

Cortez smiled then, smug in his hubris and then a solid hit from War Machine's right gauntlet knocked him out cold.

"Dumbass," he heard the electronically filtered voice of the man in Stark armor speak.

He growled, then, though Polaris used her still-enhanced power to hurl the Wakandan straight at him, knocking both of them down and winding them, temporarily taking them out of the fight.

Captain America was still stalemating Sabertooth, as the Helicarrier was lowered to the ground by the Hulk, who decided to take a leaf from his clash in Capetown.

The first sign for Sabertooth of just what kind of trouble that meant was when a green fist burst out of the ground beneath him and the monstrous mutant roared in pain at the squeeze on his ankles.

With a grin worthy of his more savage self, the Hulk metronomed Sabertooth as he'd done to Loki those years ago. Incredibly, the mutant lived, though he made a single whimper of pain and could move. There were times he _really_ hated having a healing factor.

The Hulk's intervention tilted things in a hurry, Avalanche's best efforts incapable of doing more than speeding the Hulk up as he got madder and the reedier tones of Banner became the rumbling gutturals of the Hulk.

"My turn," the Hulk growled, and then his hands clapped together and Avalanche fell like a stone.

That left Rocket (who found himself grounded the hard way by Polaris), and now just himself and his daughter, back to back, against Earth's mightiest heroes.

Thor smiled, then, "Well fought, but it will do you no good."

Magneto then levitated into the air and the very air _thrummed_ with the power he unleashed. Arcs of electromagnetic power erupted outward as Thor yawned.

"I am the God of Thunder, mortal."

He grinned, then. "But it is nice to face someone who's truly a mortal after my own heart."

With that he hurled Stormbreaker, empowered by the full weight of his lightning at Magneto, who first fired a blast of gamma radiation straight at the Hulk, who blinked with a "What" only to find himself Bruce Banner again, staring at his human self in shock, a shock mirrored by the other Avengers. Stormbreaker was then suspended in mid-air, as the hovering figure who'd so neatly turned, along with his daughter, something that seemed nearly over into something just beginning. His gaze turned to, of all of them, Wanda Maximoff, who stared at him in bemusement, his voice triggering partial memories that could not have happened.

The submarine and the disassembled missiles rose in the air again as War Machine rose, Nakia wheezing from the impact and grateful to Wakandan tech that she'd only have bruises and not a fractured spine from that impact. War Machine's guns cycled into full power as Magneto's eyes met Wanda's.

"Wanda Maximoff, my Scarlet Witch." The hovering figure whose eyes crackled with electromagnetic force boomed those words in a voice that smote the air. 

The team was speechless, he had turned the Hulk back into Banner and caught Stormbreaker in the air and held it in suspension without any true effort in the matter. He had nothing to fear of 

Wanda stared at the voice, hearing a familiarity that lurked at the corners of her imagination and her mind but one she did not understand. 

"I don't know who you are." 

The......mutant, he called himself, Magneto, gave her a smile and in a voice that reminded her eerily of Ultron said "You will." 

Then he hurled Stormbreaker into War Machine, knocking Rhodes down with contemptuous ease and as he held the disassembled missiles and the sub in mid-air he raised his left hand. 

"They changed you from what you were, daughter. Or at least I hope they did. Nazis do not treat Jews and Romani kindly." 

Wanda froze at that moment and then that power within her from the Mind Stone crackled, or so she told herself. Within her head she heard a faint laughter, low and deep and inhuman......and then green light blazed and slammed into her with an overpowering eruption of fire as Magneto's gaze kept Captain America pinned down by the weight of his shield and the metal in his uniform.

Polaris's powers lanced out, grabbing Captain America by the shield and sending him into Bruce Banner with a force miraculously clean enough to knock them both out from the sheer concussive force without making Banner turn green again.

For his own part, Thor growled and flew down toward Magneto, only to encounter a set of repulsor blasts strong enough that he fell to his knees, dazed. He'd never quite encountered anything like it, and it was one of the times where his feebler physique cost him. Two more blasts and he slumped forward onto all fours, his head ringing and his ears droning with a whine.

Polaris's gaze toward Wanda was that of a woman who viewed most anyone but herself as an insect, her sniff one of contempt.

She had raised herself to her feet, by then, the last Avenger standing, and she stared at her hand. It had been a light pale pink with her hair a dark red. Now it was a _medium brown, and she looked at her other hand._

"W-What?" 

"Now you're as I remembered you."

She looked at him, her eyes wide.

"Who _are you?"_

"I am Erik Lehnsherr, my Scarlet Witch. I am your father."

With an ironic salute he told Polaris "Gather my soldiers. They did well for a first time fighting the Avengers. We shall strike again soon."

With that and the Brotherhood drawn in green light, Wanda fell to her knees, staring at the sky in mute shock, as she began to experience a rolling wave of memories.

Thor, shaking his head as the disorientation passed, looked at Wanda and his eyes bugged out.

"How?"

She looked at him with a desperate plea of uncertainty and whispered "Help me," before her exhausted body fell unconscious, that low laughter pealing again and Thor sniffing the air. There was _power_ here, a strange one and yet familiar, one that he'd felt partially given the proximity of Sokovia to Mount Wungadore.

His eyes narrowed as he looked at Wanda.

\--------

Stephen Strange clicked off the television set. He didn't know why the History Channel still called itself that. When it wasn't telling stories of the Howling Commandos vs. HYDRA and the Soviet Leviathan, it had all manner of horseshit on. In this case, it was a show on one of the strangest kinds of cryptids, and a subset that had arisen fairly recently, in the last few decades. Rumors of things neither beast nor man, clad in the armor of medieval knights (loosely, this armor was rumored match at least Stark Tech in its power).

"The Society of Creative Anachronism meets a Furry Convention" was the phrasing of a commentator on the program who'd clearly missed no meals but quite a few hygiene elements. "These Knights of Wungadore-"

There was a sudden rush of _power_ in his Sanctum and he leaped to his feet, the TV clicking off with a flick of his finger. There was a woman, in a chair, in his Sanctum. Or something that _looked_ like a woman clad in a robe, with a pale face.

Stephen Strange stared in blank confusion at the woman who was sitting in a chair in the Sanctum Sanctorum. He moved his hands and the spherical rune-adorned energy that his order called into being blazed with the light of a golden sun.

"Who are you, and how did you get here?"

He could feel _power_ in the woman's motions, a power that was matched by only three beings in his experience: Thanos of Titan, Wanda Maximoff....and Carol Danvers. Yet this was of a somewhat different order, a nature that he glimpsed but could not quite comprehend. Her golden eyes were stars and he was transfixed by it, as the full weight of his magic built and was then dispelled by a light wave of her fingers.

 ** _I am called Oshtur in the tongues of sorcery known to Earth and in other names in other tongues. Many are my names and many my spheres._ ** She gave him a slight curl of her lips. _**I come to give you a warning, my champion and heir to Nimue of Avalon and the Badb of Tir Na Nog. There was one on your world, now there are three. Two have awakened and the third shall, soon.**_

Stephen rolled his eyes. "Well that's very helpful. If you're capable of giving me the warning, couldn't you do something about this yourself?"

Oshtur smiled then and seemed to grow in size and what were robes of strange ill-determined hues but mostly dark greens and dark blacks became a suit of elaborate plate armor for a moment and then a kind of outfit not unlike that of the various heroes of his world.

_**Of course I could, but with what awakens and the power at my disposal, you would not have a world after. My.......family...relishes such things. I do not. You and your kind, the heroes of this world shall save yourselves.** _

"Oh. Well, uh........thanks, I gu-" Then the name fully dawned on him.

"Oshtur? _The_ Oshtur, mother of the Vishanti?"

She smiled then and it was no longer a human smile.

 _ **Indeed, Stephen Strange. For what it's worth, you handled this much better than did Nimue when I first appeared before her and warned her of Dormammu casting an eye to this realm.**_ A flash of energy and she was gone with a strange smile. Stephen Strange blinked. "Well that happened."

\-------

_Prague:_

Anna Marie was terrified, though not nearly so much as her mothers when the gleaming figure finally caught them all. What was worse, the figure had ripped one of her gloves clean off her hand and torn another one off partially, though mercifully avoiding contact.

"Raven," Carol spoke, her voice resonant and echoing with the power that flowed through her.

She met Captain Marvel's gaze proudly, not letting her fear shine through as much as it was.

"Let my daughter go, it's me you have the quarrel with."

Carol smiled. "I remember how you tricked me into thinking you were......a few people. I don't trust you, so I'm going to have to decline."

With that she grasped with her own bare hand her daughter's hand as Raven shouted "Wait, stop you don't know what you're-"

Carol Danvers' eyes widened, her gamble to push Raven to surrender by using her daughter's foolishness to evade a messier fight in the actually valuable areas of Prague backfiring. The power that gripped her was _pulling_ her, and she felt power and her literal life-force flowing through her.

From a confident superhuman powerful enough to face Thanos she was wheezing like first a regular woman, then an elderly woman.

From a woman who was beautiful even by the standard of superheroes she was becoming a gaunt skeleton wrapped in flesh, blood dripping from her mouth.

Destiny ran then, tackling Rogue down, or at least she tried to. She yelped in genuine pain at the shock, realizing her visions were correct....but she'd been a few seconds to slow to grasp their implication. The shock of that impact led Rogue to drop Carol Danvers, whose body slowly shifted back to something more like its normal form as the impact of Rogue's touch faded. More like, but not altogether so. She was leaner now and her face more gaunt.

Rogue felt a _rush_ as she'd never imagined before, and she heard _a new voice_ like those of all the others that hid in her head.

She gasped when she realized why her parents seemed shorter than they were. She was _levitating._

"What's happening to me?!" 

"We have to go, now."

Destiny spoke, her voice strained, her body covered with bruises and her motions delicate and ginger. By careful effort after a couple of failed tries, Rogue, Destiny, and Mystique slipped off into an afternoon that marked one of the more crucial turning points in the history of the Avengers.

From an attempt to keep a shapeshifter from shifting shape to outmaneuver her (and for all she knew if she shapeshifted to match her appearance she might even gain her powers, too), to this.

It was Nick Fury who found Carol Danvers deep into an inexplicable coma with two Skrulls on either side of him.

"Motherfucker."


End file.
